Senate voting threatens more than our eyesight

Something needs to be done about the Senate voting system, but it shouldn't be left to just the politicians to resolve.

Alan Porritt: AAP

The Senate is one of the most powerful parliamentary upper chambers in the world, yet our current voting system allows fractionalised parties with no chance of significant electoral support to enter a lottery for the last seat in each state, writes Antony Green.

On polling day, as Australians peer through their magnifying glasses at the Senate ballot paper, trying to distinguish between up to 110 candidates they've never heard of, they may wonder how Australian democracy descended to such a farce.

A nation that introduced the secret ballot to the world, that led the world extending the franchise to all adult males and then all women, has somehow managed to produce a Senate electoral system that is incomprehensible to all but the most psephologically skilled.

Electoral systems evolve over time, but in the case of the Senate's system, it has atrophied.

Instead of acting ahead of time to deal with an explosion of candidates, as had already happened with exactly the same system at state elections in both New South Wales and South Australia, the status quo of the existing Senate system has been allowed to continue.

To conduct a Senate election whose result will be determined by byzantine deals between unknown backroom operators is bad enough. But to give voters only two options in voting, to accept the deals or be forced to number up to 110 preferences, is an abuse of the power granted to Parliament by the Constitution to determine the method of Senate voting.

Above all, it is just not acceptable to have a system that requires people to use a magnifying glass to cast an informed vote on who will run the country.

Conducting an election under such circumstances is a farce that Australians, and the politicians responsible for not acting ahead of time to fix the system, should be embarrassed by.

An election is a process by which the will of the people is translated into representation in a chamber of parliament. In the case of the case of the current Senate system, the will of the people can be interfered with by the strict control of preferences granted to political parties by the group ticket or 'above the line' voting system.

The current system was bought in with laudatory intentions. Before 1984, electors had to number every square on the ballot papers, a system that produced a scandalously high rate of informal or spoiled ballots. It was standard for more than one in ten ballot papers to be excluded from the count because of errors in the preference sequence.

Above the line voting gave voters another option, a single '1' where the voter accepted the preference ticket of the party. More than 95 per cent of Australians use this option, inflated no doubt by being the only alternative to numbering every square.

The power of the new system was shown at its first use in 1984 when Labor and the Coalition acted in concert to keep Peter Garrett of the Nuclear Disarmament Party out of the Senate despite him polling 9.6 per cent of the vote. Three years later, the Labor Party reversed its position and elected the NDP's Robert Wood despite him receiving only 1.5 per cent.

The major parties, along with the Greens and Australian Democrats, also used the system in 1998 to prevent up to four One Nation senators from being elected.

But what's good for the goose is good for the gander, and the same power that ticket voting gave major parties was also available to minor parties. Major parties already had some power to influence preferences with how-to-vote material. Ticket voting delivered power to control preferences to minor parties, and as it turned out, even to micro-parties.

The first signs that there were problems with the system emerged in the NSW Legislative Council election in 1995 when so-called preference 'harvesting' elected Alan Corbett representing a party called A Better Future For Our Children. He polled 1.3 per cent and skated to a quota on the back of preferences from all the other micro parties on the ballot.

At the 1997 South Australian election, the then little known Nick Xenophon used the same harvesting method to get the preferences of every other minor party on the ballot paper to turn 2.9 per cent into a seat in the SA Legislative Council. So far Xenophon is the only member elected by preference harvesting to subsequently turn their election into vote power at the ballot box.

The first mega-ballot paper came at the 1999 NSW Legislative Council election when 80 groups and 264 candidates created a ballot paper the size of tablecloth. Malcolm Jones of the Outdoor Recreation Party was easily elected despite polling only 0.2 per cent of the vote, harvesting the preferences of 21 suspiciously related parties.

In 2004, Family First's Steve Fielding (1.9 per cent) used these methods to harvest enough preferences to get ahead of the third Labor candidate and then win election thanks to a preference deal that its proponents in the Labor Party had never expected to be required to deliver on.

And in 2010, DLP Senator John Madigan (2.3 per cent) also won election by preference harvesting, in his case by leap frogging the third Coalition candidate.

When I raise this issue, I usually get accused of just being down on minor parties. I'm accused of wanting a system where only the big players get elected.

That is not true. The Senate's electoral system is a form of proportional representation, and I believe that any party that can achieve a significant level of support is entitled to be elected.

What I don't agree with is fractionalised parties incapable of campaigning or receiving significant electoral support engaging in entirely strategic preferences based on the principles of twister rather than the principles of politics, simply to enter a lottery for the last Senate spot in each state.

The Senate is one of the most powerful parliamentary upper chambers in the world. It should be for the public to determine its balance of power, not for unknown deal makers to engineer an outcome.

My concern is that the farce of the 2013 Senate election may produce the wrong sort of change, where the existing players get together and simply make it impossible for the little parties to grow or get elected by introducing threshold quotas.

The better alternative is to do what NSW did after the 1999 debacle, to abolish between-ticket preferences, but allow voters to express their own preferences for parties above the line on the ballot paper. Preferences are moved back into the hands of voters where they belong, and parties that campaign for votes with how-to-vote material can try to influence preferences, but parties that don't campaign for votes lose control of their preferences.

As a minimum, the Victorian Legislative Council system should be copied. Voters are only required to give as many preferences below the line as there are vacancies, five in the Victorian case. This is much fairer than the endless lists of preferences required in the Senate.

The current system gives no encouragement to like-minded parties to coalesce and grow by attracting votes. Ending party control of preferences would discourage micro-parties from competing against each other and encourage them to coalesce and learn to build real support in the electorate.

A change similar to NSW was proposed by Liberal Senator Eric Abetz after the 2004 Senate election. Unfortunately, his proposal insisted on compulsory preferential being used above the line, again raising the prospect of a surge in informal vote.

It would have also been impossible for the Electoral Commission to deal with. Currently less than 5 per cent of votes need to be data entered to conduct the complex Senate count. Requiring that 100 per cent be entered would have been a logistical nightmare.

Something needs to be done about the Senate voting system, but it shouldn't be left to just the politicians to resolve. They got it to the current predicament in the first place.

The current Senate system will be a joke on September 7 and change is required. The clearest solution is a simpler system that allows voters to understand what is happening with their vote, and frees up the result from the control of back room operators.

Put preferences back in to the hands of voters where they belong, and if this requires the acceptance of some degree of optional preferential voting, better that than magnifying glasses.

Antony Green is the ABC's election analyst. View his full profile here.